Five Summers (17 page)

THE MIDSUMMER HEAT WAS STIFLING AS MADDIE stood at the edge of the creek, trying to figure out how to get across without getting wet up to the waist. There were rocks she could step on, but they were scattered in a zigzag pattern three feet apart, and besides, they looked slippery and sharp. If she’d had time to strip down to her bathing suit she would have gladly just waded in—it was noon and the sun was high, and while trees offered some relief it still felt unbearable, like she was a dinner roll being kept warm in the oven. But she was carrying twenty pounds on her back and they still had ground to cover, so there was no time for a free swim.

They’d been hiking for five hours, since seven a.m., after a breakfast of turkey jerky and canned orange juice. The night before, they’d had to strip branches and build their own shelters using tarps and rope. Maddie’s whole body ached, and she was getting blisters not just on her feet but also on her shoulders, in the spots where the metal frame of her pack rubbed against her skin.

“Maybe you should call this trip Weekend of Welts,” she joked to Jaime, one of the two counselors leading the expedition. He was exactly the type of person Maddie had always pictured when she thought about camp counselors: clean-cut, outdoorsy, and enthusiastic to the point of being obnoxious. Even though they were in the middle of a seven-mile loop of trail with no one else around, Jamie was wearing a name tag. Maddie was supposed to be wearing hers, too, but she had “lost” it during a snack break.

“How about Weekend of Whining?” he said with a grin, clapping her on the back and tramping through the water so enthusiastically Maddie’s face got splashed. “Look alive, Ryland!” Jamie was both an extreme sports nut and a hopeful Marine recruit, and as a result he usually acted like he was starring in a Jeep commercial. He and her stepdad, Eddie, would have gotten along famously.

Thanks for the help
, Maddie thought.

It was kind of her own fault she was doing WOW to begin with, of course. She couldn’t go home between sessions and she couldn’t stay on camp grounds during the reunion that happened over the weekend. It hadn’t been something she’d thought about when she’d sent the e-mail to Mack that had led to her enrollment at Camp Nedoba. She’d been nine years old. She hadn’t been thinking about anything then, except running away, and for as long as possible. Luckily, Jo had been waiting anxiously ever since their first summer to be old enough to participate in a WOW trip, and she’d begged all the girls to do it with her. So Maddie’s misery had company, at least.

“After this weekend,” Emma panted, coming up behind Maddie and leaning over with her hands on her knees, “I’m never, ever going to take dry socks for granted ever again.”

“I’m never eating gorp again,” Skylar said, stretching her right triceps, which was wrapped with a beaded American Indian armband. Her dirty blond hair was woven into twin braids like Pocahontas. “Unless I need to throw up.”

“What are you guys waiting for?” Jo asked, breezing past them and hopping from rock to rock like she was carrying a pack full of helium balloons instead of heavy camping gear.

“Nice work,” Jamie said, raising his hand for a high five on the other side. Every minuscule accomplishment received a high five from Jamie. Sometimes, for variety, he mixed it up with a fist bump. “Now, come on,” he said. “We’re holding up the team.” The other campers on the trip, two girls and six boys who were all thirteen and fourteen, along with the second counselor, Tallie, had all crossed the creek before Maddie had even gotten there.

One by one, Maddie watched her friends brave the creek crossing. None of them treated it like a big deal, not even Emma, whose legs were almost as short as Maddie’s, and who couldn’t climb a tree or swim a lap to save her life.

“All right, let’s go, come on, Maddie,” Jamie called.

She looked down at the two-foot drop onto the first rock, and at the three feet between that rock and the next one. Suddenly, the crossing seemed impossible, the perspective stretching grotesquely until it was a raging river. Maddie’s heart raced and her limbs froze. In the middle of the wilderness, at a most inconvenient time, Maddie found herself in the middle of a panic attack.

Eddie hadn’t always been so distant. Before he’d lost his job, he had actually been kind of fun. And after her sisters had been born, even though she wasn’t his natural child, he’d made sure to carve out special time for Maddie so she wouldn’t feel jealous. She was seven years old the day he decided to take her to the pool at the community center.

It wasn’t very deep in the kids’ shallow end, which was separated from the grown-ups’ deep end by a thick concrete wall tiled with green. Maddie had never been a fearful child and had been climbing trees, drainpipes, and anything she could get her hands on since she was a toddler. So she jumped into the water and was happily splashing when Eddie had crouched by the lip of the pool.

“Hey Mads, betcha can’t walk from this end of the wall to the other,” he’d laughed.

“Betcha I can!”

“All right, let’s see, small fry.”

The top of the wall was almost submerged in the chlorinated water, which lapped from both sides up onto the slick tile. But Maddie thought nothing of it and stepped out like a tightrope walker in her little pink two-piece with the purple butterfly on the chest. She looked back at Eddie, who smiled and clapped.

“Are you sure it’s allowed?”

“It’s a free country, anything’s allowed,” Eddie said. “G’on. Trust me. I’ll go meet you at the other end.”

She held out her arms and walked out into the middle, inching one foot after another along the smooth tile, feeling the rough grout in between with her little toes.

“Watch out, honey,” a woman called from the shallow end where she was playing with her young daughter. “I don’t think you should be up there. It’s not safe.”

“My dad says it’s okay,” Maddie said. “He’s right over—”

And then she fell.

Her right foot slid left and she lost her balance, coming down hard on her shoulder before she slipped below the surface of the deep end. She looked up as she sank down, seeing the ceiling ripple through the bright blue water that stung her eyes.

Eddie got to her within ten seconds, but by that time she’d swallowed a mouthful of water and scraped her cheek against the edge of a tile. He’d taken her out for ice cream after, but she didn’t stop shaking for an hour. She just kept feeling herself fall and seeing the world retreat slowly from view.

“Maddie!” Jamie yelled. “What are you waiting for, a taxi? Let’s go.”

“No.” She backed away and shook her head. “I can’t.”

“Yes, you can,” Jamie sighed. He jumped to the rock in the middle of the creek and held out his arm. “Trust me,” he said.

Maddie burst into tears. “I don’t trust you!” she yelled. “I can’t do it! You can’t make me!” She leaned on a tree and sobbed as the rest of the WOW group stared at her from the far bank. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to catch her breath, but she was so afraid that she could already hear the splash she would make when she dropped into the water.

“Hey,” Jo said, appearing beside her. She had made the splashing noise when she crossed back over; it made Maddie feel better to know she wasn’t as crazy as she thought. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” Maddie said, keeping her face against the cool bark. “I’m just afraid.”

“Of what?”

Maddie took a deep breath and felt her lungs expand. She wasn’t going to stop breathing. It had all been in her head. “Falling.”

“I won’t let you,” Jo said. “Neither will Jamie, even though he’s obnoxious.”

“I don’t think I can do it yet,” Maddie said. “I need to sit for a minute.”

“Okay,” Jo said, squatting next to her as Maddie dropped to her knees.

“Hey, what’s going on?” Jamie yelled. “We’ve got to make ten more miles before dark!”

“You can wait a few minutes,” Jo shouted back, annoyed. “She’ll be fine.” She turned back to Maddie. “You’ll be fine,” Jo said, stroking Maddie’s back. “I promise. I’ll be right here. And then we’ll go over together.”

Maddie kept her eyes closed. She took a few deep breaths. She tried to remember that she wasn’t at the Fayetteville community rec center; it was hundreds of miles away. And she wasn’t even in the wilderness. Wilderness was thick and messy, with blinding brush that tugged at your skin and hair, pulling you down. She was on a path, and she wasn’t alone.

“I’m ready,” she said after a few minutes. She took Jo’s hand, she said a prayer, and she stepped off the edge.

BY THE TIME SHE AND SKYLAR GOT BACK TO THE beach, Jo was exhausted. She might have been the only one who hadn’t had an emotional breakthrough so far at reunion, but she still felt spent and decided to clear her head with a swim.

The water was cold and gray, just the way she liked it. Jo knew that a lot of people preferred white sand and crystal blue waves that looked like they’d been Brita filtered, but she’d take Wexley Island over some cookie-cutter paradise any day. She loved the way the muddy lake bottom squished between her toes, and the crisp, fresh, slightly floral smell of the unsalted water. “We’re lake people,” her dad always used to tell Jo, as her mom watched them swim from the porch of the rental house. “Your mother is landlocked.”

She knew that her friends thought it was weird how much she loved camp and how devoted she was to it, but it was hard to explain that sometimes it literally felt like all she had. Her dad had bought the property less than six months after the divorce, and Jo knew it had been no coincidence that he wanted to stay near Onan, the site of the Putnam family’s annual vacations. She knew this because her mother had called it, more than once, his “bizarre, sad attempt to cling to something that no longer exists.” Jo had just nodded—she was eight years old at the time—but even then, she knew she was clinging, too. Who wouldn’t want to live in their happiest memories all year long?

Jo bobbed in the lake and looked back at Maddie and Skylar on the beach, noting how ironic it was that she was literally treading water and watching her friends live their lives. She dunked her head, and when she resurfaced, she saw Nate walking down the shore toward their towels. He spotted her and waved, and she smiled. She had to hand it to him—the guy had great timing.

“Hey,” Jo said as she waded back in, her hands instinctively reaching up to wring out the ponytail she no longer had.

“Hey yourself,” Nate said. “I was hoping I’d catch you before you headed back.” He handed her her towel. “Maddie also said to give you this.” Nate held up a piece of blue fabric.

“What . . .
is
that?” Jo looked over at Maddie, who gave her an enthusiastic nod.

“I don’t know. It’s Skylar’s. I think you’re supposed to wear it,” Nate said.

“Oh . . . right. Thanks.” She finished drying off and wrapped the sarong awkwardly around her waist. Out of the corner of her eye, Jo thought she could see Maddie shaking her head.

“So, listen,” Nate said, “I was hoping we could hang out tonight after dinner.”

“Sure,” Jo said. “What’s everybody want to do?”

Nate smiled shyly. “It’s not everybody. Just me.” Jo could see the fear in his eyes as he waited for a response, and the realization hit her:
He’s asking me out
. Jo had never been asked out before. Well, there was that one time at the camp dance when they were twelve that an older guy named Jason had asked her to slow dance, but it later turned out to have been a dare, so it didn’t count. She studied Nate’s face. It was objectively handsome. And he was nice—
so
nice. She knew that the normal thing to do when a nice, cute guy asked you out was to say yes. But then they’d have to have an awkward date, and awkward talks, and she worried it would all just be too awkward.

“I don’t know, Nate . . .” She didn’t want to hurt him, but she also wasn’t in the mood to deal with more emotional melodrama, on top of everything that was going on with her friends.

“Did I mention I make a
really
good bug juice?”

She smiled. “Thanks, but—”

“And you look beautiful in that, um . . .”

“Sarong?”

“Right. That sarong. Well, you do. Look beautiful in it.” He shifted his weight nervously.

She blushed. “Thank you,” she said. “I would love to, seriously, but this weekend is so crazy and . . . I mean, I’m basically running camp. So I don’t really have time.”

“Oh, come on,” he said. “That’s not true.”

She crossed her arms defensively. “Actually, it is,” she said. “I have to get everyone back on the boats, get them back to camp safely, oversee dinner, prep for capture the flag . . .”

“I’m not saying you’re not the backbone of this camp, because you are,” Nate said quickly. “But you’ve scheduled this weekend down to the nanosecond. I know because I helped you with most of it. So I also know that everything has already been taken care of. And even if it wasn’t, your dad’s around. I think he’s camp director or something.” He smiled and crossed his arms, imitating her with a skeptical eyebrow raise. “So, actually, I can’t really see how you don’t have time for an hour with me by the lake, especially if I take your dinner shift.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Jo said, softening her stance.

“What if I already did?”

“Then . . .” She looked over at Maddie, who nodded vigorously while pretending to read her book. Jo sighed. She did like Nate, as a friend anyway. It was just an hour. It probably couldn’t hurt. And she’d still have time to review her capture the flag strategy with the girls. “Okay,” she said.

“Yeah?” His eyes lit up.

“Yes, but I only have
one
hour. I’ll meet you by the fire pit at eight.” She turned and started to walk away. “And no beer!” she called over her shoulder.

When she reached the towels, she balled up the sarong and tossed it at Maddie and Skylar, who were grinning stupidly. “Why, hello, cupids,” she said. “Do you have your bows handy? Because I’d like to smack you with them.”

“Come on,” Maddie said. “He’s adorable. And he’s so into you. Look at him!”

Jo glanced back at Nate, who was still standing at the water’s edge watching her. She gave him a limp wave and he smiled. Jo had to admit that she did feel
something
when she talked to Nate—an uneasiness roiling in her stomach. But was that butterflies or nausea at the thought of kissing him? Jo hoped she’d be able to tell the difference by nightfall.